Well, if there are any Novell supporters left, here's
something else to put in your pipe and smoke it. Novell is
forking OpenOffice.org.

There will be a Novell edition of OpenOffice.org and it will support
Microsoft OpenXML. (The default will be ODF, they claim, but note that
the subheading mentions OpenXML instead.) I am guessing this will be
the only OpenOffice.org covered by the "patent agreement" with
Microsoft. You think?

Facts barely matter when they get in the way of a good
smear. The comments over at Groklaw are interesting, in that
they explore new levels of ignorance.

Let me explain.

We have been working on OpenOffice.Org for longer than
anyone else has. We were some of the earliest contributors to
OpenOffice, and we are the largest external contributor to
actual code to OpenOffice than anyone else.

We have for years maintained go-ooo.org (as well as its
previous incarnations) a site where we encouraged new
developers to join the OpenOffice effort, and worked to lower
the barrier for contributors by creating tutorials,
pre-compiled images and provide
tools for contributors to work on it (some of this content
is now being migrated to OpenOffice's new Wiki system).

For years we have been shipping a patched version of
OpenOffice because the release schedule of OpenOffice did not
match our release schedule. In the very same way that Linux
distributions have to ship patches against vanilla packages
because the release schedule of those packages does not
necessarily match the release schedule of a distribution.

The work at go-ooo.org started in the Ximian days, when we
were an independent startup, and we did quite a lot of work to
make OpenOffice better integrate with the Linux desktop,
upgrading its aging pieces and did quite some work on
improving its performance.

Our patches have been published in here (see for
example) for the longest time. And plenty of them have
already been merged upstream.

But technically, Ximian never shipped a vanilla OpenOffice,
we always shipped an improved version of it (with bug
fixes, with backports or new features). This is nothing new.

Today we ship modified versions of OpenOffice to integrate
GStreamer, 64-bit fixes, integrate with the GNOME and KDE file
choosers, add SVG importing support, add OpenDMA support, add
VBA support, integrate Mono, integrate fontconfig, fix bugs,
improve performance and a myriad of others. The above url
contains some of the patches that are pending, but like every
other open source project, we have published all of those
patches as part of the src.rpm files that we shipped, and
those patches have eventually ended up in every distribution
under the sun.

But the problem of course is not improving OpenOffice, the
problem is improving OpenOffice in ways that PJ disapproves
of. Improving OpenOffice to support an XML format created by
Microsoft is tantamount to treason.

And of course, the code that we write to interop with
Office XML is covered by the Microsoft
Open Specification Promise (Update: this is a public
patent agreement, this has nothing to do with the
Microsoft/Novell agreement, and is available to anyone; If
you still want to email me, read the previous link, and read
it twice before hitting the send button).

I would reply to each individual point from PJ, but she
either has not grasped how open source is actually delivered
to people or she is using this as a rallying cry to advance
her own ideological position on ODF vs OfficeXML.

Debating the technical merits of one of those might be
interesting, but they are both standards that are here to
stay, so from an adoption and support standpoint they are a
no-brainer to me. The ideological argument on the other hand
is a discussion as interesting as watching water boil. Am
myself surprised at the spasms and epileptic seizures that
folks are having over this.

Btw, I believe the translator that people are discussing is
built with C# and XSLT and is available here.
I wonder some of the posters on the Groklaw thread are going
to have a stroke over the fact that the software is hosted at
source forge.